Entangled Cities: Spaces of improvisation in contemporaryLatin American urban culture

Symposium hosted at the University of Cambridge, 1–3 May 2025, with support from SLAS

Over the course of three vibrant days, the University of Cambridge became a dynamic

meeting ground for scholars, artists, and thinkers united by a common interest in the

complexities and creative possibilities of contemporary urban life and culture in Latin

America. Held at St Catharine’s College and convened by Liesbeth François, Geoffrey

Kantaris, and Carlos Fonseca, the international symposium Entangled Cities: Spaces of

Improvisation in Contemporary Latin American Urban Culture brought together voices from

across the UK, Latin America, and Spain to explore the multiple temporalities,

contradictions, and generative tensions coursing through the region’s urban landscapes.

The symposium was inaugurated on 1 May 2025 with a pre-sessional workshop, Writing the

City: A Conversation with Juan Villoro, in which the acclaimed Mexican novelist reflected on

the imaginative and political demands of urban writing. This intimate session set the tone for

a symposium that would resist static understandings of the city, instead foregrounding

processes of improvisation, layering, and entanglement.

Workshop Writing the City with Juan Villoro

From the outset, the programme’s structure encouraged dialogue across disciplines, genres,

and geographies. On Friday 2 May, the first full day began with opening remarks and an

introductory framing by the convenors, followed by a first panel which examined how cities

accumulate and expose layered temporalities – from buried trauma in the Peruvian Andes, the photographic and filmic reverberations of industrial processes in Monterrey, to ghostly cartographies of Mexico City. Later that morning, the second panel continued the conversation, focusing on both urban and human ‘infrastructures’, (im)mobility, and the

interplay between stillness and flow in spectral cinematic and literary urban spaces.

Session 1 Desedimentation: urban landscapes and the layering of temporalities

The afternoon’s keynote address by Juan Villoro, México: una ciudad en busca de tierra

firme, offered an electrifying reflection on Mexico City’s shifting ground – literal and

metaphorical – and its capacity to unsettle ontological certainties.

Keynote

Following the keynote, participants engaged in an experimental session, Urbanías enredadas, which invited creative improvisation around AI-generated multimodal cityscapes. In this session, participants were encouraged to co-create artistic or poetic representations of Latin Amerian urban spaces and/or their social, infrastructural and creative dynamics, with the help of carefully selected AI language and image models running on an open-source platform.

There were also crafts-based alternatives. Participants rose up to the challenge and created around 30 thought-provoking submissions.

Saturday’s sessions expanded on questions of memory, power, and ecological entanglement. The third panel ranged across Havana and Puerto Rico, with papers on, for example, post-disaster Puerto Rican art and architecture framing cities as contested

repositories of collective memory. This was followed by the second part of the extension

activity, which transformed the symposium floor into a collaborative mind-map of the art and

poetry that had been submitted the previous day. Participants were handed a random

submission and were asked to find a place for it in a randomly distributed set of concept cards laid out on the floor of the symposium venue. Meanwhile, the convenors and student helpers linked the artwork to the concepts using red yarn, creating an entangled map of concepts and creative outputs.

Creating the entangled mind-map

The final panel turned attention to the intimate resistance in the literary portrayal of cities,

and the entangled nature of port cities in Chile and Peru..

The event concluded with a lively roundtable which discussed the new vocabularies and

concepts that had been forged across the fascinating spectrum of papers during the event, and returned to a central theme of the symposium: that amidst crisis and contradiction, Latin

American cities persist as crucibles of invention, unpredictability, and resistance.

Bringing together scholars of literature, film, visual culture, architecture and urban theory, the

symposium affirmed the need for interdisciplinary, multimodal responses to the lived

complexities of urban transformation. As participants dispersed, the city – no longer simply

the object of study – lingered as a provocation: a terrain of constant negotiation, assembly,

and reinvention.

We intend to channel the inspiring contributions to this symposium into a volume.

More news on this coming up soon!